Celebrating the release of The Strange Account of Charlie Wendigo, Matthew Kline sits with us to talk about the book, it's inspiration and some adjacent topics.
This interview is part 1 of 2 parts. We'll post the link to part 2 here once it is available
Q. Give us a little background on you, and how you came to want to write a novel.
Writing has always been something I’ve enjoyed doing in one form or another- comic scripts, resources for RPGs, short stories, manuscripts. It’s been a longtime hobby of mine. And over that longtime I had a number of false starts. This was the first story I gained any real traction with.
Q. Let's talk about how the idea for Wendigo came to you.
I was watching a magician on TV one night. I started thinking about how we get to a point in our lives when we stop looking at what they do as magic and start looking at it as a trick. We become so wrapped up in looking for that trick that we regrettably stop seeing the magic. Then I thought, what if there were someone who could do magic, real magic, but anyone who saw it just dismissed it as a trick. That was the beginning of Wendigo.
Q. We know, here in Brick Cave, that the manuscript gives off great Pratchett and Adams Vibes. Talk about that a little, did you have moments where you thought, "Oh, Adams would have written that?" sort of little epiphanies?
I’m not sure what made me decide to add footnotes to my story, but once I did, I heard them being narrated by the ‘Voice of the Book’ from the old BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series. The footnotes acted as brief interludes to the story, much like the book excerpts in Hitchhiker’s. I think that qualifies as an epiphany. That's when I realized the Adams-esque direction my story was taking. And while there’s a bit of his influence in there, along with one or two little nods to his work, I feel much of the book was still done in my own voice and style.
Q. Let's talk about the magical realism genre, what are your thought on it? Where does Wendigo fit.
In my opinion a little bit of magic goes a long way. You have to be careful not to saw the suspension of disbelief in half. Magic is a covert thing in the majority of what I write, known to exist only by the chosen few. Subtle and secret. Wendigo’s magic is subtle, simple card and coin tricks that are in reality much more than they appear.
Q. Most authors inject a bit of auto biography into their work. Do you see that in any of the characters for the novel... are you Charlie? Harry? Jane? Nobody?
I don’t know about auto biography, but the character I identify most with is Harry. That’s by design though, Harry’s the Everyman. I’m hoping others identify with him as well.
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